Party

(i)

At four, my parents announced

I was to have my first party;

even now, the word suggests

magic presences, picture-book

beings, mystery.

At half-past three, the doorbell rang–

all my pals were squatting on the front-steps–

"What are they doing here?"

I screamed.

My parents showed me their list–

"Who else could you have wished for?"

they said.

So while my guests ate gooey cake,

pulled each other’s hair and

played pin the tail on the jackass,

I sulked in a corner by myself,

naming the anonymous.

(ii)

We scrounged all the tubes of Lepage’s we could find

and hooked up at Nancy Cochrane’s garage

(her parents were away).

I remember almost passing out

with the life-giving bag over my face–

then suddenly we were all dancing in a chain

around the lawnmower, chanting

"Negro music is good; yeah yeah yeah.

Negro music is good; yeah yeah yeah."

Blimp went downtown

to try to talk the hobby-shops

into selling us more glue.

He never came back..

So Crow headed to campus

where he persuaded a shaggy guy called "the Bear"

to sell us half a dozen hits of windowpane.

Nothing happened at first, but then

in the distance, we heard a train slowly maneuvering

into town, and someone whispered the word

shunting,

and we laughed for half an hour.

Everyone was starting to peak

when we decided to go inside–

walking into the kitchen, no-one could speak–

the acid had eaten away the labels/

skinned the categories;

we had to scrounge new words

for these wonders surrounding us

(bread was crystal-cloud, as I recall,

apples fire-skins, sugar diamond-dust).

We sat around the dinner-table till dawn

naming the anonymous.

x, y, z

Recently all my thoughts alphabetical

center on x, y, & z: the vestigial stump,

the scruff, the ruins,

the wreckage of the alphabet,

or as Nabokov said, the zoo.

Antipode to those clean-cut poster-boys,

the ABCs, these aren’t your A-type personalities,

chain-smoking characters

panhandling in front of the liquor store,

plonking away on their zithers & xylophones;

loitering outside darkened train stations

as you glide by in the night–

from now on, all the signposts you pass

will be in cyrillic.

x— mark of the illiterate, the unletter,

the scrawl. Marx, Malcolm x, Hendrix,

(don’t trust anyone with an x in their name);

– the unknown, the x-factor, the x-ray

(because its inventor didn’t know

what force he was working with).

x marks the spot; tripled—keep away;

in sequence—to cancel or obliterate.

Yet, the power to magnify, multiply. Xerox.

y— the alphabet’s androgyny;

some nights, when the moon’s full,

goes about as a vowel. Some kind of

ying/yang, y/x/y chromosome’s

in the equation, in the stew now.

A yoking (yolking?) of signs,

of signifiers (zeugma?),

sandwiched between those two

grommets of the tea-set, x & z.

z— a slash. A zig-zag. The anti-letter.

The zenith. The zone. Zero

to zillions. A to Z; say it out loud,

and right away the inevitable questions

raise their pointy heads.

Riddles resolved? All’s revealed–lit up

by a succession of lightning-shaped z’s?

(The zebra did it.) Or more like,

z as in snooze, the big vacation, some excellent zzzzz

ad infinitum, replicating themselves right off the edge of the page.

A final word? It’s right here, zymurgy–

the study of fermentation;

this one ends up in a yeasty bog,

a noxious ooze.